Donn's Legacy, page 1
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. The use of any real company and/or product names is for literary effect only. All other trademarks and copyrights are the property of their respective owners.
Copyright © 2020 Caryn Larrinaga
All rights reserved.
A Twisted Tree Press Publication
North Salt Lake City, UT
www.TwistedTreePress.com
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Thank you!
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Caryn Larrinaga
The Soul Searchers Mysteries
Donn’s Hill
Donn’s Shadow
Donn’s Legacy
Other Books by Caryn Larrinaga
Superhero Syndrome
Dread Softly: A Collection
Hide and Seek
Galtzagorriak and Other Creatures:
Stories Inspired by Basque Folklore
For Amuma. I’ll never stop missing you.
CHAPTER ONE
A moving truck sat in front of Primrose House, its front tire bent inward by the concrete curb. I glared down at it through my apartment window as several men and women wearing matching navy blue jumpsuits ferried furniture from the truck to the house. They weren’t supposed to be here yet; the morning sun had just barely risen over the hill, and when I went to sleep the night before, I’d been sure Graham and I would be on the road before the truck arrived.
“Best laid plans,” I muttered as I went back to stuffing clothes into my suitcase.
This was the second such truck to mar the view outside my window that month. The first had come just two weeks before to carry my best friend, Kit Dyedov, off to Los Angeles to chase her dreams. In a classic case of adding insult to injury, she’d had the nerve to force me to carry her furniture from her second-floor apartment to the U-Haul, then complained when I wasn’t “Tetris-y enough” about arranging it.
I still couldn’t believe she took everything with her. When she decided to help her girlfriend launch a new paranormal documentary series called Hidden Truths with Amari Botha, I expected her to pack a few weeks’ worth of clothes into a backpack, test the waters, and send for the rest of her things when she was sure this was the right decision. But then, she had seemed pretty sure when she and Amari pulled away from Primrose House and left Donn’s Hill together. And from the excited texts she sent me on a daily basis, she didn’t have any regrets.
She didn’t seem to miss me half as much as I missed her.
Now this second truck was delivering the furniture for Primrose House’s newest resident, a man I hadn’t yet met. He would fill the empty second-floor apartment with his own things, his own personality. Would he be friendly and outspoken like Kit? Stingy about coffee creamer and personal space but generous with everything else? Hilarious, brusque, driven, and the absolute funnest scary-movie-marathon partner in the world?
I doubted it.
A light tap sounded at my door, and Graham Thomas strode into the room. My landlord-turned-boyfriend’s heavy eyebrows knit together over his glasses when he spotted my half-packed luggage.
“You’re still not ready?” he asked.
“I’m almost there.” I ducked into the bathroom for my toiletries as Graham peeked out the curtains.
“Maybe I should stay and help them,” he called to me. “Just for an hour.”
“I thought you said the guy hired a moving company.” I dropped an armload of shower bottles into the suitcase and glanced pointedly at my wristwatch. “Besides, we’re late already.”
“Uh-huh. And whose fault is that?”
“Striker’s.”
He smirked. “Right.”
“It is! I packed yesterday—you saw me do it. And I could swear I zipped up my bag before I went to bed, but this morning it was open on the floor and… well, look what she did.”
The clothes I originally intended to take with me to New Mexico were strewn across the braided rug that covered most of my studio apartment’s floor. Several of my T-shirts had bite marks in them, and every item was covered in a thick layer of cat fur. The destruction was too thorough to be accidental. While I slept, she had pulled everything out of my luggage, dragged it purposefully around the room, and rolled back and forth on top of it until she left a suitable mark.
Honestly, if I’d been able to watch it, I wouldn’t even be angry.
Graham covered his smile with one hand and shook his head. “Sorry. I shouldn’t laugh.”
“She’s a menace, and it’s your fault,” I accused. “You spoil her constantly, like with that cat door.”
“Hey, you were just as bothered by her moping around as I was.”
He was right. Striker was an outdoor kitty, used to coming and going as she pleased through my window. The sloping roof and sturdy tree outside the turret were her own private staircase, and throughout the warmer months she scampered up and down the three stories all day long. But a feline arthritis diagnosis and the recent cold weather convinced me it was better to keep the window closed and force her to go in and out through the ground-level doors like a civilized cat.
She hadn’t been pleased.
Her constant howling at the back door broke our hearts and irritated the other tenants of Primrose House, so Graham installed a cat flap in the kitchen. In a typical show of feline gratitude, she thanked him by vomiting into both sides of his suitcase when he got it out to pack for our trip.
A troubled look crossed Graham’s face as he stooped to pick up one of my cat-fur-crusted shirts. “Maybe she’s trying to tell us something. First my luggage, now yours. Do you think she wants to stay home?”
I recoiled from the suggestion. “What, with a sitter or something?”
“I don’t know. It’s a long drive. Maybe it would be better if she didn’t come.”
As I knelt on the slightly overfilled suitcase to zip it closed, I considered his suggestion. My boss, Yuri Dyedov, would probably be willing to check in on her twice a day. We might even be able to leave her in the care of my masseuse, Elizabeth Monk. We were only planning to be away for a week. Striker would survive being apart from us for a quick burst.
But I had a vision in my head of how this trip should be. I couldn’t call it a vacation; to me, vacations were schedule free, lazy spans of time spent relaxing or casually taking in the sights. Our journey to New Mexico had several overlapping agendas, and I wasn’t sure how much time we’d really have for napping or meandering strolls.
On paper, we were going to check out a few art galleries in Albuquerque that Graham had connected with earlier that year. Being able to write off the travel expenses was the only way we could justify splurging on our lodging—there was a fine line between “affordable” and “wake up murdered” that I was never willing to cross again. Plus, the places that let you bring cats along charged an extra fee.
The real reason we were taking this trip was simple: my gut had been screaming at me to go for weeks, and my instincts told me I needed Striker with me.
This idea had first popped into my head after Graham and I found a van smashed into a boulder outside the city limits. Two men had been ejected from the vehicle, and by the time we found them, they were already dead. I had been trying to make contact with their spirits since, because what we found in their van raised way too many questions to ignore.
First, I wanted to ask them about their cargo. Their van was packed full of moldy old cabinetry and wood paneling from a notoriously haunted cabin, and while I couldn’t prove it, I was sure the wood contained the spirit of a man named Richard Franklin—a murderous poltergeist I’d been trying to banish. They also had a small wooden jewelry box containing an equally malevolent force—a box they had stolen from Graham’s garage the night before the crash.
Both spirits had escaped into the night sky as the van and its contents went up in flames. I felt their negative energies evaporate as they moved on to the next plane of existence. There had been no reports of paranormal activity at the haunted cabin since. But those facts brought me little peace; there was still too much I needed to know.
How had they extracted Richard Franklin from his hunting ground? Was his spirit already tied to the things they stripped out of his cabin, or had they somehow bound him to the wood? Either way, where were they taking him, and for what purpose? Whose ghost was trapped in the jewelry box? What was the pur pose of the Seal of Solomon on the bottom?
Only three people knew the answers to those questions. Two of them had died on the side of the road that night, and if their spirits lingered between worlds, I hadn’t been able to reach them. It didn’t help that we didn’t know their names. The sheriff’s department ran into so many dead ends identifying the men that they passed the case on to the state police, who were still investigating. The third person… well, I had his name. And if I wanted to take off the black tourmaline necklace I wore to protect myself against negative energies, I was sure he would appear.
My hand unconsciously leapt up to the stone, and as my fingertips stroked the cool, smooth surface, I let out the breath I’d been holding. The necklace was still there. It still protected me. As long as I wore it, he couldn’t find me.
But I wanted to find him.
The man who called himself Horace had psychically stalked me, pretending to be a ghost trapped in the attic of a local inn. He tricked me into going into a haunted forest to find a jewelry box I was sure he had left there for me in the first place and, equally suspiciously, had ordered the men to steal back. He’d been toying with me from afar, astral projecting from an unknown location.
I didn’t know enough about astral projection to even guess where he might really be. But the van his lackeys crashed bore license plates from a familiar state: New Mexico.
It was my only lead. My friend in the sheriff’s department told me the van had been stolen from long-term parking at the Albuquerque International Sunport, so the plates were real. Odds were Horace was down there. And if I was going to find him, I needed all the help I could get.
“I want Striker with us,” I told Graham as I picked up my suitcase. “I’ll just feel safer if she is.”
“Okay. It’s your call.” He looked around my apartment. “Where is she?”
“At your place.”
He looked startled. “My place? No, I thought you had her up here.”
Our eyes widened in unison, and we took off running out my door. Our footsteps pounded down the wide, angular staircase to the second floor, where I narrowly avoided colliding with a man carrying a typewriter.
“Easy!” the stranger snapped, yanking the machine back as though I’d tried to snatch it from him. “This is a ‘49 Adler!”
“Sorry, Reggie.” Graham pulled me backward. “We’re just looking for our cat.”
Reggie—who I assumed had to be Primrose House’s newest resident—looked vaguely familiar to me. He was taller than Graham, with salt-and-pepper hair rapidly receding from a wide forehead. His dark eyes showed no sign of recognition when they met mine, but I knew I had seen him before—on TV maybe, or in a magazine.
“Do I know you?” I asked.
He tightened his grip on the typewriter. “Doubtful.”
“You look so familiar,” I pressed. “Are you an actor or something?”
“I’m a writer.”
“Oh!” I took a few steps toward him. “I love to read. What have you written?”
“Uh…” He looked me up and down. “Nothing you would know.”
That stopped me where I stood. His tone of voice made it clear he wasn’t being modest about the popularity of his writing. Whatever his books were about, he didn’t think I was… well, something enough to have read them.
It wasn’t a compliment.
Without another word, he ducked through the open door into Kit’s old apartment, leaving me to gape after him. I’d known, obviously, that whoever moved in after she left couldn’t possibly match her friendliness. But I hadn’t expected my new neighbor to insult me within five seconds of meeting me.
Before I could ask Graham what Reggie’s deal was, my boyfriend sprinted for his own closed door. I left him to search his apartment and hurried downstairs to comb the first floor, checking the unoccupied apartment in the converted butler’s pantry and the large living room off the vestibule. Graham found me as I was on my hands and knees in the kitchen, hoping to find Striker loafing on the heat register beneath the table.
“She up there?” I asked.
“Nope.” He eyed the cat flap in the back door. “She’s outside somewhere.”
I groaned. She could be anywhere in town, and we were already running late. By the time we found her and got on the road, we’d be guaranteeing ourselves a midnight arrival in New Mexico. I just wanted to be there already.
As I silently debated whether it would be better to delay our departure until the next day or leave her here and arrange for someone in the house to put out fresh food and water, my phone buzzed in my pocket.
“You left town yet?” Elizabeth Monk said when I answered. The voice of my massage therapist made my shoulders reflexively relax downward a full inch.
“No, we’re still at home. Why?”
“Good. Thought you left your little puff behind.”
I nearly dropped the phone in relief. “Striker’s with you?”
She chuckled in my ear. “Showed up half an hour ago, howlin’ and scratchin’ at the front door. Don’t think she knew you canceled this week. Or that she was six hours early for her usual appointment.”
“Let me guess: you gave her a massage.”
“Can’t say no to that face.”
“Trust me, we know the feeling.” I rolled my eyes at Graham. “Thanks, Elizabeth. We’ll be right down.”
We packed our luggage beneath the camper shell on a borrowed pickup truck. Graham’s faded yellow Geo Metro couldn’t be trusted to make it more than a few hundred miles at a time, and his father insisted we take the truck for any longer journeys. In the cab, Graham carefully fastened an oversized pet carrier with soft, tentlike sides on the back seat and tucked a fresh bag of kitty treats into the glove box.
A few minutes later, we arrived at The Enclave, a neighborhood within a neighborhood that catered exclusively to psychics, occultists, and other intuitives. I had been spending a lot of time in The Enclave lately, filming special episodes of Soul Searchers with Yuri. We were shorthanded, since our former cameraman, Mark, had gone to LA with Kit. But we had bills to pay, so while we waited for responses to our help wanted ads, Yuri scrounged up work where he could. His girlfriend happened to be the deputy mayor of Donn’s Hill, and together they cooked up a scheme to keep us busy on the town’s dime by shooting short featurettes about the local psychic community that the tourism commission could post online.
It was far from my favorite thing to do. We were essentially making commercials, and none of them gave me any opportunity to use my psychic gifts. I missed the thrill of reaching out to a spirit and feeling their answer. I craved the high it gave me to help people deal with a haunting. Anything less just felt like a chore.
Halloween decor was still strung up between The Enclave’s brightly painted row houses, and scattered orange candy wrappers from last night’s trick-or-treaters littered the ground. At the far end of the cobblestone footpath, a hulking two-story building housed the Ace of Cups, a gastropub with a deliciously carb-heavy menu and a popular Sunday brunch. My stomach growled, but we didn’t have time to stop for food. It would have to be a protein bar on the road at this point.
From the porch of a pink building between us and the pub, a gangly man in his early forties swept fallen leaves from his shop’s steps. Stephen Hastain was a rune caster, Irishman, and Graham’s best friend. He cupped his hands around his mouth, and his voice echoed off the surrounding storefronts. “Hey, Mac! When’s my interview, eh? Elizabeth’s getting all the attention!”
I flapped a hand at him as I sprinted down the path, futilely trying to get him to lower his volume. “Good grief, are you always this loud this early? Your neighbors must hate you.”
